It is easy to find plenty of advice on how to incorporate AI into your organization and personal life.
LinkedIn feeds, YouTube channels, blogs and every social platform out there includes reviews of the latest offerings, which AI to lean on for which task, prompting tips for best results and even how to turn an entire team of AI Agents loose on entire segments of your business.
Some of it is helpful. Keeping up feels impossible.
And then there’s the cheery stuff. You know, the impact on the shape of organizations. Entire roles absorbed by AI. Positions eliminated. Mass RIFs. Full scale restructuring.
It is a lot.
If you’re like me, you bounce between enthusiasm and apprehension.
By now no one has to convince you of AI’s inevitability. Or even of it’s value. But with a landscape that shifts almost daily, conversations that feel like they require a new vocabulary plus ethical, not to mention moral issues in the mix, how do you get a handle on what to do next?
A Place To Focus
No one will fault you for feeling like everything is shifting, and new structural underpinnings are being made up on the fly; but the foundation for a successful enterprise is not as different as the market noise might make it seem.
These three elements are the DNA of a human adventure. AI can help you with how these are articulated; but the work related to identifiying these three elements must be led by human beings.
It can be challenging; but shortcuts have the effect of stripping a venture of its heart and soul.
This isn’t new with the intrusion of AI. But it is more critical.
Vision is why you get up every morning to do what you do. It is uniquely human, typically blends art and science…experiences and expertise…and It defines an ultimate destination.
Core Values provide touchstones and guardrails. What keeps you on course and is the final proving ground for every critical decision? What are the three or four ideals or ideas that are absolute and around which you will not compromise? Your Core Values bake humanity into a venture.
AI can be a useful sounding board. It can help hone the way each of these is articulated; but this stuff is the purview of human consciousness, decision and reason.
It is the imagination, heart and empathy of any endeavor.
But what you call it isn’t as important as this: even in the age of AI, the heartbeat of any endeavor is the domain of humanity.
And the future belongs to those who, rather than viewing this as soft and unrelated to the bottomline, have invested in the identification, articulation and nurture of what makes a uniquely human endeavor